HARVESTER AUTOMATION AND PRECISION AGRICULTURE TRIALS IN QUEENSLAND 2006

DURING the 2006 harvest season, research engineers from Cuba trialed harvester automation and precision agriculture (PA) equipment from TechAgro in three harvesters in the Herbert, Burdekin and Mackay districts of Queensland. The equipment had been developed specifically for sugarcane harvesters over more than five years in Cuba and Brazil. It was fitted and ran on CAMECO 2500 and 3510 harvester models, being validated over a broad range of field conditions, which varied from extremely wet green cane in the Herbert following a major rainfall event; heavy clay flood irrigated profile and burnt cane in the Burdekin; to green cane in light sandy soils in the Eton area of Mackay. Equipment trialed included automatic base cutter control, yield monitor and harvester benchmark system software. The automatic basecuttter system demonstrated an ability to work in all conditions and allowed settings to be easily made by operators in different crop and soil conditions. The yield monitor provided valuable data for yield mapping, being the preliminary step to understanding and managing field variability, while benchmarking makes it possible to evaluate several parameters of harvester efficiency over the time or space.